This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Where Mark Carney and Naomi Klein agree: Mallick

Bank of England governor Mark Carney, left, chats with European Central Bank president Mario Draghi in Washington this month. Carney told a World Bank seminar about the "tragedy of horizons," in which distant problems are neglected by governments and corporations. (MANDEL NGAN / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

The world is painting itself into a corner with its extraction and use of fossil fuels. Although the phrase “oil reserves” may sound comforting, burning all the carbon that humans have discovered and banked for extraction might well end our civilization. Most climate change and fossil fuel experts know this but who dares say it aloud?

One of Canada’s boldest and brightest exports, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, said it quietly last week in a World Bank seminar that went largely unnoticed. It was reported by Jon Hay of emergingmarkets.org and re-reported in the section of the Guardian but it wasn’t a homepage headline for mainstream websites. This is puzzling, especially since readers may have children who are going to have a very difficult time of it when Carney, who has four daughters, is proved right.

Carney was saying what Naomi Klein has written in her great new present-and-future on climate change, This Changes Everything. Fossil fuel companies have uncovered massive oil, gas and coal reserves, laid claim to them and reassured their boards, managers and stockholders that the profits will flow in. This is capitalism at its energetic best, and worst.

The problem is that if those reserves are burned, the world will see catastrophic climate change. I could refer to our smugness about this as “cognitive dissonance” but prefer the paint-job metaphor because it’s more tactile. How are we going to get out of the planet’s increasingly hot smelly room as it grows tinier? We won’t.

“The vast majority of reserves are unburnable,” Carney said. One should think of them as “stranded assets,” meaning that they’re ostensibly valuable to investors but will ultimately end up as inert or, more accurately, deadweight. If they are burned, Klein reports in her book, the planet will heat up far beyond what we could possibly cope with.

Article Continued Below

At the moment, many scientists hope we can keep global warming below a 2 degrees Celsius increase by 2050. That’s if we burn 565 gigatons (a gigaton is one billion metric tons) of carbon.

Fossil fuel reserves booked and ready for extraction and burning are at 2,795 gigatons. In other words, we can use 565 cans of paint and perhaps narrowly escape. There are 2,795 waiting to be opened and used.

Carney, talking to his audience of corporate interests and pension fund investors, referred to a “tragedy of horizons.” By this he meant the tendency of capitalists — governments, corporations and investors — to look only to the near-term and not the future. If there’s profit around the corner and doom in the distance, capitalism will always be loitering locally.

Klein’s book has been a smash hit — it just won the $60,000 Hilary Weston Prize for non-fiction — but its subtitle, Capitalism vs. the Climate, may have scared some readers. Klein isn’t saying capitalism has to end — because, for one thing, it won’t — but that it has to alter itself to accommodate the hard facts of what fossil fuels have done to our climate and our hopes for survival, or even keeping our basements unflooded.

She’s talking about a good life for the next generation. Carney is talking about the same thing although he phrases it differently. I worry that both may not be heard because the message is difficult to absorb.

Carney was again calling for “integrated reporting,” meaning, as Hay described it, that annual reports should include “not just statutory financial information but a holistic account of their business strategy and how it relates to stakeholders of all kinds, now and in the future.”

If it sounds soft, it’s not. It’s harsh. The best journalism is done in finance because investors care deeply about accuracy and the fate of their own money. Investors wouldn’t mind if the rosy glow of BP’s annual report were dimmed by a warning that climate change means solar power is going to start looking better than Canadian bitumen. They want the truth, always profitable.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper doesn’t say these things. His world view goes no further than 2015, or 2020 if you give him another majority. The function of government is to map the future and prepare for it. Harper won’t do this. Carney and Klein will.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com